Logitech VIP-ER

A Business Intelligence solution

Market-leader hardware manufacturer and long-time partner Logitech hired us to develop an enterprise-level reporting and analysis solution that supports the management in strategic planning and decision making. Logitech has an extensive network of affiliated partners and distributors. Monitoring their business acitvity, the ability to perform complex analytical queries and make the results accessible on a single, coherent interface highly increases the efficiency of all sales and marketing efforts.

As Logitech had already established its software environment, including server platforms and databases, most of them being Java/J2EE based, the new application needed to seamlessly integrate with the existing host framework. We accomplished this by adopting the BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) technology, an initiative of the Eclipse open source community. BIRT allows a broad range of report types to be displayed, including lists, charts, crosstabs, or a combinations of these, all with extensive formatting that matches corporate color schemes. The drill-through feature makes it possible to move horizontally between two reports that are in a master/detail relation. for example users can drill through from a summary report to view the detailed sales transactions for a particular distributor. Report templates can be chosen from a rich library.

Sales figures are fed into the system by the distributors on a regular basis. Reports are then generated real time, in response to a query. The data can be summarized, filtered and grouped according to a great many categories, such as shop, merchandizer, price, product, date, country and so on. BIRT allows sophisticated operations to be performed such as grouping on sums, percentages of overall totals and more.

The reporting application is highly robust; in spite of the large quantity of entries the database stores – over a million lines – it responses user queries with almost no delay. The state-of-the-art, web 2.0 compliant technology, along with the multi-table MySQL database in the background, ensures the highest level of reliability, security and uptime.